Voyager - Diana Gabaldon [68]
His mother had had a cloak made of sealskin, when he was a boy. He had been allowed to touch it once, marveling at the feel of it, dark and warm as a moonless summer night. Amazing that such thick, soft fur came from these slick, wet creatures.
“The Scots call them silkies,” said the soldier who had recognized them. He nodded at the seals with the proprietary air of special knowledge.
“Silkies?” Grey’s attention was caught; he stared at the man with interest. “What else do you know about them, Sykes?”
The soldier shrugged, enjoying his momentary importance. “Not a great deal, sir. The folk hereabout have stories about them, though; they say sometimes one of them will come ashore and leave off its skin, and inside is a beautiful woman. If a man should find the skin, and hide it, so she can’t go back, why then—she’ll be forced to stay and be his wife. They make good wives, sir, or so I’m told.”
“At least they’d always be wet,” murmured the first soldier, and the men erupted in guffaws that echoed among the cliffs, raucous as seabirds.
“That’s enough!” Grey had to raise his voice, to be heard above the rash of laughter and crude suggestions.
“Spread out!” Grey ordered. “I want the cliffs searched in both directions—and keep an eye out for boats below; God knows there’s room enough to hide a sloop behind some of those islands.”
Abashed, the men went without comment. They returned an hour later, wet from spray and disheveled with climbing, but with no sign of Jamie Fraser—or the Frenchman’s Gold.
At dawn, as the light stained the slippery rocks red and gold, small parties of dragoons were sent off to search the cliffs in both directions, making their way carefully down the rocky clefts and tumbled piles of stone.
Nothing was found. Grey stood by a fire on the clifftop, keeping an eye on the search. He was swathed in his greatcoat against the biting wind, and fortified periodically by hot coffee, supplied by his servant.
The man at the Lime Tree had come from the sea, his clothes soaked in saltwater. Whether Fraser had learned something from the man’s words that he had not told, or had decided only to take the chance of looking for himself, surely he also would have gone to the sea. And yet there was no sign of James Fraser, anywhere along this stretch of coast. Worse yet, there was no sign of the gold.
“If he went in anywhere along this stretch, Major, you’ll have seen the last of him, I’m thinking.” It was Sergeant Grissom, standing beside him, gazing down at the crash and whirl of water through the jagged rocks below. He nodded at the furious water.
“They call this spot the Devil’s Cauldron, because of the way it boils all the time. Fishermen drowned off this coast are seldom found; there are wicked currents to blame for it, of course, but folk say the Devil seizes them and pulls them below.”
“Do they?” Grey said bleakly. He stared down into the smash and spume forty feet below. “I wouldn’t doubt it, Sergeant.”
He turned back toward the campfire.
“Give orders to search until nightfall, Sergeant. If nothing is found, we’ll start back in the morning.”
* * *
Grey lifted his gaze from his horse’s neck, squinting through the dim early light. His eyes felt swollen from peat smoke and lack of sleep, and his bones ached from several nights spent lying on damp ground.
The ride back to Ardsmuir would take no more than a day. The thought of a soft bed and a hot supper was delightful—but then he would have to write the official dispatch to London, confessing Fraser’s escape—the reason for it—and his own shameful failure to recapture the man.
The feeling of bleakness at this prospect was reinforced by a deep griping in the major’s lower abdomen. He raised a hand, signaling a halt, and slid wearily to the ground.
“Wait here,” he said to his men. There was a small hillock a few hundred feet away; it would afford him sufficient privacy for the relief he sorely needed; his bowels, unaccustomed to Scottish parritch and oatcake, had rebelled altogether at the exigencies